Somewhat defiant art post and picture spam

[bimo]

Last Saturday, Cavendish and I took advantage of the long weekend and went to see the “New Objectivity” (“Neue Sachlickeit” in German) exhibition at the Kunsthalle Mannheim, just a couple of days before the exhibition’s closing date on March, 9th.

In short, a great day out. Fantastic art and after that a nice stroll through the inner city of Mannheim, including a visit to Mannheim Baroque Palace, which is one of the largest palaces in Europe and nowadays serves as one of the main buildings to host the city’s university.

Pleasant and safe train ride back home.

I have no words for how I felt when, two days later, on Rose Monday, around lunch time the news broke that two people had just been killed in a deliberate attack by a 40-year-old German who had driven his car right into the crowds at Mannheim’s main city centre shopping area.

In light of this, it took me a while to decide whether I really wanted to post an entry that was originally intended to be nothing more than an artsy picture spam with a few extra words how poignant, inspired and incredibly well curated “The New Objectivity - A Centennial -2024/11/22 - 2025/03/09” is as an exhibition.

As the museum’s web page puts it:

“It is extremely rare for an entire epoch to be defined by a single term. However, the young Mannheim Kunsthalle director Gustav F. Hartlaub succeeded in doing just that with his legendary exhibition "Neue Sachlichkeit" (New Objectivity) in 1925. Far beyond its art-historical significance, the term has become synonymous with the cultural awakening of the 1920s - and with the rationality and objective precision observable in art, architecture and literature, which can be seen as a reaction to the great political and social upheavals of that decade. One hundred years later, the Kunsthalle Mannheim is dedicating a major exhibition to the phenomenon of "New Objectivity", which both pays tribute to the achievements of the time, but also critically questions and complements them, especially with regard to the work of women artists, since not a single woman was represented in the 1925 exhibition.”

Personally, I would say that one of the exhibition’s main achievements is to highlight how “New Objectivity” was also a parting of ways for many of the partaking artists, a crossroad from which to go either left or right, straight towards the abysses of Soviet style Social Realism and the atrocities of propagandist art promoted by the newly risen-to-power Nazi regime.

Or, as a third way, to stick to the values and perceptions of Modernity, which during the following years, of course led to the artists in question being persecuted and their works getting labelled as degenerate, banned and destroyed.

The video installation featured in the last exhibition room as a send-off for visitors, does a wonderful job at suggesting how the original “New Objectivity” exhibition might have looked like back in 1925. However, it is also deeply unsettling because it emphasizes and pays tribute to the amazing works of art that we lost.